[deleted]
Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#32Even with the acknowledgement of the concept "flagship species" in conservation, I still don't get the obsession of monarch butterflies. The effort put into it seems to be pretty "narrow" for lack of better words (as in, it can't help much for other species). Did I miss something about how important it is?
Nope, it's just that for people it's easy to just focus on a few species instead of the whole web.
It also allows people to think "Yeah, that one particular species had a good year, so everything is fine and we can go back to business as usual".
I for one don't hold my breath.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#33Considering the weather patterns (cold and wet in the west cost), this wouldn't be the case without global warming. Bad news.
[deleted]
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#34[deleted]
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#35Considering the weather patterns (cold and wet in the west cost), this wouldn't be the case without global warming. Bad news.
Well, the breeding patterns of single species fluctuate very much. Global warming could be an issue, could not be an issue here.
In the long run, global warming will definitively wreck havoc, so; still bad news.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#36When I was a kid on a farm in Saskatchewan, there were hundreds of Cabbage butterflies in my backyard, and usually a dozen or so Monarchs. I remember the Monarchs being easy to catch with my hands, as if they weren't afraid. Now that I know how much their population has depleted, these memories feel extremely idyllic to me.
It is interesting that people from about a +/- 20 year group have your same experience. One that shows you have memories of what was once but now, in the same lifetime, is no more.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#37Even with the acknowledgement of the concept "flagship species" in conservation, I still don't get the obsession of monarch butterflies. The effort put into it seems to be pretty "narrow" for lack of better words (as in, it can't help much for other species). Did I miss something about how important it is?
people like LCMs: Large Charismatic Mammals. Tigers and elephants are easier to get funding to help compared to some ugly fish. People find most bugs gross and so are unlikely to help out. But the monarch is beautiful and many people remember them fluttering through their lives every year.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#38Monarch butterflies are nice and such, but let's not take this as an indication that everything is hunky-dory. The world's still going to hell in a hand basket if we don't address the predatory ecosystem exploitation that's currently driving our global economy. Habitat destruction is continuing, we still poison our fields and rivers and we still continue to cut apart vital ecosystems into smaller and smaller patches get more vulnerable every time.
But still; go little butterfly!
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#39This is wonderful news, 13,000 sightings in one location is 6x more than ALL western US locations last year. Western US populations have collapsed: 4.5m in 80s, 1.2m in 1997, to 100k in 2002, to 2k in 2020.[1][2] One issue is Monarch larva can only eat two plants: both milkweeds, toxic to their predators. Birds will vomit and then avoid them.[3] However, in recent years not one milkweed plant could be identified with…
I wonder.
One mutation, and an a species can become resistant to certain toxins. For example, the plant itself is toxic to birds, yet the monarch eats it.
Did some mutation happen, and now the progeny of that lineage are multiplying? If other monarchs die, they'd have lots of food available, so would exponentially grow.
Hmm.
Re: Substantially more monarch butterflies have arrived in California to overwinter
#40When I was a kid on a farm in Saskatchewan, there were hundreds of Cabbage butterflies in my backyard, and usually a dozen or so Monarchs. I remember the Monarchs being easy to catch with my hands, as if they weren't afraid. Now that I know how much their population has depleted, these memories feel extremely idyllic to me.
Not Monarch Butterflies, but my youth included a similar experience with Lightning Bugs. They completely disappeared from our yards by my teens, but before then, a major part of the non-winter experience was catching and releasing them in bare hands at dusk. We took it for granted at the time.
During the covid lockdown, I had some fireflies in my backyard. Gone this year, and I haven't seen them in any of the other years I've been here. I wonder if there's a correlation?